ENL 106 Grammar Story - I had to choose a word that I liked and I had to write something about it that PDF

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I had to choose a word that I liked and I had to write something about it that correlated with who I am....

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Uriel Rivas 1/20/19 ENL Part 1: Prewriting Activities Magniloquent: 1. Dictionary Definitions and Word Class Adjective: Lofty and extravagant in speech; grandiloquent. Adjective: Speaking pompously; using swelling discourse; bombastic; tumid in style; grandiloquent. Phrase: The politicians always persuade me because of their magniloquent speeches. Eventually though, I come back to my senses. 2. Oxford English Dictionary

 hich means to be Etymology: magniloquent comes from the Latin word magniloquens, w talkative/verbose Magniloquent can sometimes be used to define someone boastful and to describe someone who has a lot of utterances/compositions! 3. Ten Sentences (and some more) Sentence #1: The tall duck wore a magniloquent tuxedo for the ball at Yesterhall. Sentence #2: The working class starred at the magniloquent capitalist with a strange awe, not for the man, but for his clothes, his wife, and his other luxuries. Sentence #3: Magniloquence Sentence #4: Haven’t you heard of something so magniloquent as Mozart? Sentence #5: If I was the child of a bumblebee, would I have created such magniloquence out of my violin?

Sentence #6: “Let me tell you something, Edna. Those magniloquent ducks won’t stop! They won’t get off our property, they have demanded more food, and now they want to take over my life! I can’t have that! Edna, if they can show their magniloquence so proudly like that, then what’s stopping me from showing them my  own? ” Sentence #7: Tonight, I want to tell you all about this man's terrible magniloquence! Sentence #8: Wondering about the dogs, eh? They’re fine, nothing to worry about other than maybe they’ll like their freedom too much, all those magniloquent harmonies out there in the world, and nature herself provides it, so I wouldn’t worry about them too much. Sentence #9: They call me King Dust II! I am the king of dust! Yes, that dust! The little particles of memory that people have forgotten and that I have stolen! It nourishes me knowing that I have everyone’s secrets and you have none of mine! Yes, I am being magniloquent, why can’t you act the same? Oh, you don’t have any dust? How sad! Sentence #10: Now wait, I am King Dust III! I am the penultimate king of dust! I have collected more minute particles of memory and I have duplicated Dust King II’s particles and have made them my own! He’s so strange! He eats coal for dinner and bathes in fish skeletons! Magniloquence? He has none! In the same way he steals other people’s privacy, I have stolen his own! Yes, even his so-called magniloquence! He has no magniloquence! He only has his fish skeletons and his coal.

Part 2: Grammar Narrative Let me create a word circus. Let’s see how the whales begin to fly with their newborn wings towards the Temple of Dust, the temple that secures everyone’s memories , and we have to remember that the everyone is nuts! Yeah that’s right, nuts! As I write this, someone is cracking under pressure, while someone else’s back is just getting cracked. As I write this, duck investigators are trying to decode who killed the magniloquent ducks in Yesterhall. They were determining if the murders were intentional or heinous specism *from the humans*, the beings that had been feeding them for centuries, or other strange possibilities like suicide or aliens. It was quackers! If ducks can distinguish between murder and suicide and understand concepts like specism, then there has to be some nation-state inhabited solely by ducks! However, what’s more quackers is the nonsense that just emerged *from my brain*, that constantly moving machine , and began to invade this grammar narrative. In this way, magniloquent an essential word to my grammar story because it describes my journey through vicious English teachers telling me the truth, trying to understand the concise and understood in this journey, which ultimately helped me reach that elusive 155-page draft that introduced writing as a hobby. For years, I believed I was great at writing. In elementary school, I was always exceptionally passed my grammar tests and vocabulary tests, while in middle school, I wrote delicate essays that impressed by English teachers, but in high school, magniloquent writing stole my confidence and held it hostage for 2 years. “The sounds of barking dogs from afar awoke a lone man from his slumber on the cold cement floor,” Using this sentence to introduce the topic of poverty in America, I believed I had written another hit. Anyways after my English

teacher returned my essay, this sentence, along with many others--I didn’t want to count them all--were circled with red ink. With how much red ink was on my paper, it might’ve passed for a good horror movie prop. After talking with my teacher, I found out that the accident wasn’t hers, but mine. “Uriel, your writing is too wordy, verbose, magniloquent, do you think you can revise

 hat I mean? Oh, you this essay by removing these verbose phrases? Hello? Uriel? Do you know w understand? Good.” Indeed, I understood that magniloquence came to town, shot me down, and had a few drinks with its friends until they were all down. I could’ve protected myself from its ambush with my teachers as shields, but none of my teachers covered anything that could stop magniloquence from shooting me down like those ducks from Yesterhall! Had they been bad teachers? Possibly, but they were great meat shields. Before I could even start revising my syntax, I stared at “magniloquent”, then I stared at “verbose”, and then “wordy”, and eventually, I was focusing on these words instead of their meanings! A merry-go-round of magniloquence! Where those three were controlling the merry-go-round without contempt about my ailing mental health! After a while, I stared back at my essay, particularly, its wordy phrases, but with so many of them in my essay, I had assumed I had broken a cardinal rule in the grammar bible and was going straight to hell, where the devil would patronize me with his own verbose syntax, “In this place of ash, burning, and torture you are here because you have been verbose with your syntax! And while other mortals from older generations probably wrote much more maligned than you did, reserving a spot for you so we can eat expired digestibles together is what I plan to do with you!” These accumulating fears, while detrimental to my mental health, helped me cut the “fat” of my sentences, and after I did, I returned my essay to my English teacher, but before I did, I scrupulously scanned the essay again to make sure that she wouldn’t hunt me down again. In the

moment, my magniloquent errors seemed minor and the teacher was just being unnecessarily strict, but after 10th grade, my subsequent English classes focused more on arduous essays that required fundamental knowledge about these functions. Therefore, a small episode with my 10th grade English teacher immensely enhanced my essays in my higher-level English classes, which were much more polished than my peers, and significantly enabled my interest of writing as a hobby. For years, I had never dabbled with writing outside of school work, but one day, I decided to write a 155-page draft for a book that was heavily based on a video game, and while I ignored it after writing it, I learned about the writing process, some aspects of character development and other intricacies that moved me away from cleaning up the draft to cleaning up my writing, which led me to face magniloquence once again. After my 10th grade English teacher had guided me towards brevity, I became enveloped in summer vacation, which was the time when my brain dissipated the year’s school information and indulged in constant video games, all-nighters, and strange episodes with society. During these lax periods, I would usually just constantly play video games, but 2016 was different. For years, I had an embedded feeling that I knew what my vision was, but I could never see it. I remember dabbling in writing when I was 12, “Once upon a time, there was this boy named Bobby…” While this was the beginning of my writing, the enormous effort of writing more than a few pages overwhelmed me, so I gave up there. What reeled me back to writing was a stronger grasp of the English language, and it was this strength that helped me write a 155-page draft for a supposed-bestseller. After a few months, I had finished my first draft for a book. The premise? The everyday life of a mentally-ill man and the development of his insanity. This seemed like a good premise, and the accomplishment felt

great, but I knew that what I was writing was wrong . Like those ducks from Yesterhall that knew too much, I knew too little about the topic, which created static characters that could’ve been replaced with cardboard boxes without damaging the plot. Likewise, balancing between description, action, characters, and grammar overwhelmed me, so when I was done, I was essentially staring at words that were sloppily glued together to create a chassis of the story. It was macaroni art disguised in a 155-page draft. On top of these problems, the farther I went through the draft, the more evident magniloquence emerged and strangled my sentences, subsequently leaving them to die. After reaching the end of the draft, I ran away from the crime scene and began recollecting my thoughts. First, the draft needed to be redone, but because of school I never decided to edit it, but some sentences from draft could be used for something else, so I kept them listed in a document somewhere in my brain’s file cabinet. These dangling quotes were the carrots I needed to follow the stick, the stick of creativity, and to evade magniloquence! Like a ghost, magniloquence entered through one of the open windows of my brain and declared my brain as its home. As I write this, it is still inside my brain watching The Office for the fifth time, Friends for the third time, and Coco for the tenth time, and who pays? I do. Therefore, the constant struggle with magniloquence reemerged with my draft, but it’s the draft that led me to focus on more important things to write about like duck investigators, flying whales, the devil, and other seemingly nonsensical objects that made sense through the context that I am an erratic writer. In conclusion, magniloquent is a word that defines my grammar story because it is my nemesis, an immutable wall that, if I do not see closely, is seemingly impenetrable. However, with enough dedication, I can see how porous the wall actually is and tear it down as quickly as

it was built. I can also see how the Temple of Dust has become the home of King Dust II and III, both thieves of memories and privacy . I can see who murdered the magniloquent ducks in Yesterhall, and I can hear the quacking from the other ducks as they still argue their strange theories and their penultimate fate. I can see that I am an erratic writer with an erratic nemesis: magniloquence.

Part 3: Reflection Memo Uriel Rivas

If there was something I like about the writing process is how modular it can be. For example, the devil was originally going to be in my introduction, but I moved it to the second paragraph because it made more sense to place it there. The replaced introduction was actually spontaneous to some extent, in which I knew I was going to be erratic with my introduction, but I didn’t know what I was going to put in the introduction. I also feel good about the conclusion and the introduction because they brought some surrealism to my grammar narrative, which was significant for introducing my personality and writing style. The best parts about my paper are the little parts where I show how erratic my writing can be, and I believe this will possibly be the only essay that mentions stuff like duck court, hell, the devil, macaroni art, and other nonsensical things that, for some weird reason, make my essay more sensical. Sure, mentioning something like the devil in a grammar story is something that shouldn’t make sense, but I’m able to make it sensible by providing the background of my English teacher telling me that I’m wrong. However, because I’m so used to writing serious pieces, writing a more light-hearted one is always a tougher challenge for me. All in all, this was a great writing exercise that helped me illustrate my writing and my difficulties with it sometimes....